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‘As well as the smashing of the glass hands vandals have also graffitied areas on and around the sculpture with swastikas.’

‘A feeling of this urban carnival comes across in the promotional photographs for the show, which were shot in the graffitied lavatories of the Dragon Bar in East London.’

‘People probably think we have closed down, so we have graffitied the boards saying business as usual.’

‘The results were welcomed by members of the parish council, who had asked the pupils some time ago to come up with designs to artistically graffiti the shelter.’

1.1Write (words or drawings) as graffiti.

‘graffitied names sprayed on bus shelters’

‘‘The paramilitaries have graffitied threats against us on the walls.’’

‘When a platoon of American troops in WWII were making their way across Europe, they came across a bombed-out monastery with these words graffitied on its basement wall.’

‘When Nazi swastikas were graffitied around where he worked, it took managers over a year to have them cleaned up.’

Usage

In Italian the word graffiti is a plural noun and its singular form is graffito. Traditionally, the same distinction has been maintained in English, so that graffiti, being plural, would require a plural verb: the graffiti were all over the wall. By the same token, the singular would require a singular verb: there was a graffito on the wall. Today, these distinctions survive in some specialist fields such as archaeology but sound odd to most native speakers. The most common modern use is to treat graffiti as if it were a mass noun, similar to a word like writing, and not to use graffito at all. In this case, graffiti takes a singular verb, as in the graffiti was all over the wall. Such uses are now widely accepted as standard. A similar process is going on with other words such as agenda, data, and media